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January 31, 2011

This is the second in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2011. To the left you can see the sun rise as I went to the first session. I am very pleased to be back after ten years. I first came to co-present a Lotus Notes based KM project with my client. Now I return as a blogger. IBM provided a press conference with a number of their senior execs including, Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Collaboration Solutions and Doug Cox. It followed a Q and A format. Here are the questions and IBM answers.

Q – How does IBM prioritize open standards?

A – Companies need to be able to develop mashups and allow for integration. Open Social matters. Mobile is important. REST Apps are involved here.

Q – Most social apps have been tactical rather than strategic. How will the IBM approach impact implementations?

A - You need to mix and match sources with open integration and change business process and capabilities to make for strategic applications.

Q - We are now submerged by email – soon we may be submerged by social activities. Have you looked at filters?

A - Yes and analytics is important for to make these filters work.

Q - One of the strong themes in social transformation is the need for change management. What are you doing on this issue? Secondly, many examples offered in the morning demos were about finding people quicker. What I have not seen is the reshaping of entire department processes. Have you seen this?

A - On the organization aspects we know from IBM’s own experience that you need to work across the organization using a set of ambassadors. The most successful efforts have used this ambassador approach. At Lotuspshere we will have many clients examples of how clients have transformed themselves. We have seen this happen. One area of opportunity is the advanced case exception process in customer service when you need to find experts and material to address the issue in a timely manner. Trilog, one of the winners this morning, has built a project management capability on top of IBM social capability that can provide for business process transformation.

Q – What solutions that we saw this morning were part of Project Vulcan?

A – Last year when we talked about Vulcan, we said that is a project and not a product. So this year we showed products that were influenced by the Vulcan vision such as SameTime Next. Almost everything we saw on the stage today was influenced by the Vulcan porject. Another important aspect that came from the Vulcan project was the importance of activity streams and this is in the social business tool kit.

Q – Will you work to embed social collaboration into apps rather than as a separate destination?

A – The answer appeared to be yes for such apps as Symphony but it is a “stay tuned” situation.

Q – In the real world social media can be used to organize the political opposition as well as give the oppressors new data on what their opposition is doing. What are the implications of this capability for the enterprise?

A – Setting social use policy is important. In addition, the people who are leading in the social space support transparency. It can be uncomfortable but it leads to positive results.

I would underscore the last point. Transparency can support democracy but it also can supports fairness in the enterprise and a reduction in hierarchy resulting in a more nimble and positive work environment. Both democracy and an open work place can have their uncomfortable moments but they are the most effective organizing principles.

This is the first in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2011. I am very pleased to be back after ten years. I first came to co-present a Lotus Notes based KM project with my client. Now I return as a blogger. I attended the opening general session with Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Collaboration Solutions and many others. It started with a lot of drums, music, and lights. Tim Leary should be here to see this, especially as he got into computers later.

Alistair kicked off the session after the music. He said that attendance is up this year. Kevin Spacey came out next with a Bill Clinton imitation. He next discussed all the people who were past of his success. He started in NYC on Broadway and them moved on to Hollywood. He has now running the Old Vic in London for eight years. He is still doing films and social business has helped to remain open to new ideas. So he has been using a Web-based community for new talent since 2002. There are now over 350,000 members. Many have gone on to success. Jack Lemon was a big mentor in his life. Now he wants to send the elevator back down to help others.

Kevin was also the Executive Producer of the Social Network. He was first doubtful but then saw the drama there. When they started Facebook was small but we know what has happen. He now plans to have an American ldol style show for whatabe crime bosses. He closed with the thought asking us to think about our vision and how we can work together and listen to others.

Alistar came back. He said that this may the most important Lotusphere ever. We are going through a shift in how business and technology work together under the theme of social business. Social goes beyond the Web to become a new business opportunity in increasing complex market. It can provide new leadership, speed, and collective intelligence. There are doubters but other technology movements had their doubters also.

A social business allows people to get engaged and provides analytics on this engagement. There is increased transparency and a new nimbleness. He quoted the recent McKinsey study on the business value of networked businesses. He noted that Lotus has always been about social connections. Having an open architecture is the way to be social. They have introduced a new depth of capability to the Lotus product line, along with increased analytics and simplicity to drive adoption. This built on the extensive experience in collaboration of Lotus. Now it is time ot draw on this experience.

Jim Balsillie – co-CEO at Research in Motion came out next. He showed us the Playbook, a tablet device that runs many Lotus apps. He showed the multi-tasking capabilities that are strong due to the multi-processing capabilities built on Blackberry platform. They are open tools for developers. You can use Lotus apps natively. They are going to give recognition of the top Lotus developers on Blackberry Playbook.

Jeff Schick came out next to lead a panel from BASF, KBC, CSC, and AT&T. That is a lot of acronyms. BASF offered an example of global collaboration to solve an agriculture issue in China. They were able to solve an issue then deal with the logistics of finding the right materials and getting then to China.

KBC provides financial services to local communities. To do this you need to understand issues at the local level. They are building a social network for this that includes local expertise. CSC has 100,000 employees that need to work together. Online collaboration as enabled them to close more deals. They have more communication through blogging.

AT&T needs to have employees understand granular information about their products and communicate it to customers. They use social networks to speed the communication around these needs and find the right expert to match customer needs. They have been doing this approach for some time. I was involved in building a knowledge management system for their call centers 15 years ago that enabled employees to be smarter with their customers.

Sandy Carter VP of Sales came out next. She saw the social transformation of IBM into a social business. In HR they use social capabilities for recruitment through to rewards. They use games for collaboration. They measure return on everything. For every 1 percent improvement in HR processes they save $50 million. They have a social media aggregator. They were also one of the first to have social media employee guidelines in 2005. They also use social media for product development through a Jam for brainstorming. Latest CIO study found the successful companies are 57% more likely to use social business.

Another panel discussed social business. It included Blue Cross of Massachusetts (my insurance carrier), RBC, and Australian Rules Football League. Larry Bowden led the discussion. AFL uses a portal a single point of entry that provides a role-based content. They are now going to expand the portal with analytic capabilities and allow each team have more capability.

The Blue Cross speaker noted that in Massachusetts they have had universal health coverage since 2006. There is an online connector to support this that was built with IBM. There are mobile capabilities. At Bkue Cross they try to have a deep understanding of their members. So they needed to change their customer experience and make it more social while allowing for the unique aspects of each customer. They are doing more customer segmentation. The RBC speaker said do not underestimate the complexity of a social program but do not make it too complex at the same time.

Next came the demos. Doug Cox came out to lead this portion. Project North Star is the foundation for their exceptional Web experience work. It is called the IBM Customer Experience Suite. Brian and others did the demos. He showed work apps first. There is a central activity stream. There is also real time analytics for evidence-based decision making with visualization. There is a shared calendar in Notes Next client. You do not have to be a chair of a team to change a meeting. There are a lot of mobile apps. There are also social aspects to email.

Lotus Live users can now run Domino apps in the IBM cloud. Connections 3 allows you to work entirely in your browser and it is available now. Suzanne Livingston showed us real time collaboration in the cloud, including email. You can share project aspects and have the team vote on ideas. LotusLive Symphony will be available second half of 2011.

Lotus Sametine Next will be available soon with audio and video. I was at Lotusphere ten years ago presenting one of the first SameTime implementations at Ryder, along with our Notes based knowledge management system that also used Quickplace that has transformed to be Quickr. Nice to see these tools still around and getting better.

Brian came back to show us some drag and drop Web site editing, including bringing content from Facebook. It appears that IBM is making significant extensions of many aspects of their Lotus product line to make them more social. Part of this is increased integration, even with Exchange. Doug said that IBM's view of social is not anti-social. I look forward to learning more about this over the next few days.

This coming week I am excited to be returning to Lotusphere. In my last visit I co-presented a Lotus Notes based knowledge management project with my client, Ryder. This year I am coming back as a blogger to report on the event. To mark this return we created a special version of the Darwin Awareness Engine™ that tracks conversations on the Web about Lotusphere. NOTE: Since this event is now over we have taken down the Edition. We are analyzing the data and will soon have a video overview of the results, Stayed tuned. In the meanwhile you can see an explanation of the Editions series and link to other Editions.

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ helps users track Web and Enterprise 2.0 events, uncover emerging trends and gain faster understanding of complex issues. To help demonstrate the value of this new way to present time-sensitive and contextual information.

In this edition, we presented recent news, blogs, and social media mentioning Lotusphere. We picked Lotusphere as it represents a focused and constantly changing topic with the possible emergence of unanticipated news. It also shows how the Awareness Engine can cover a specific event. Our analysis will be up soon.

The Darwin Awareness Engine presents the rising terms and related concepts emerging as events unfold from the Web’s collective reaction and participation with Lotusphere. Users can observe the emergence of topics of interest, and with a mouse-over and click, see the Web events that relate with the selection. This makes awareness and discovery much faster than managing alerts, search queries, or browsing through countless news/blogs/social web sites.

You can either look at the general buzz from these sites or, if you register, choose attractors to focus on specific topics of interest. The default shows you what has happened in the target content sources in the last hour. You can expand it to the last two hours, 24 hours and even last 200 hours. You can focus on the more formal sources or the informal ones (bloggers) or look across both. Again, details instructions can be found in our post on instructions.

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Please contact us at feedback@DarwinEco.com. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin edition with all administration rights. You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection. There are both individual and enterprise options.

January 30, 2011

This is the sixth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. This post covers the Victoria and Albert Waterfront area. It was redeveloped not long along into shops and restaurants and is a mostly tourist area adjunct to the working port. There are street musicians and great views back to the city and Table Mountain.

January 29, 2011

This is the fifth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. The Waterfront, covered tomorrow, also where you get the ferry to Robben Island where political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela were held during Apartheid. It is now a museum. Tours are conducted by former prisoners and you can learn of the difficulties of the time. It is quite a contrast to the Waterfront but South Africa is a country of many contrasts. The cell with mat and other things was where Mandela was held. The cemetery served a former leper colony on the island. The boat is the one that takes you there from the waterfront area.

January 28, 2011

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information. Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you. Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

January 27, 2011

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ helps users track Web and Enterprise 2.0 events, uncover emerging trends and gain faster understanding of complex issues. To demonstrate the value of this new way to present time-sensitive and contextual information, we have dedicated a Darwin Edition to information relating to Wikileaks, the organization that shares controversial information and one of the hot topics in today’s news.

In this edition, we present recent news, blogs and social media mentioning Wikileaks. We are acting as reporters here and are not endorsing their actions any more than any of the other news organizations that report on them. We picked Wikileaks as it represents a focused and constantly changing topic with the likely emergence of unanticipated news.

The Darwin Awareness Engine presents the rising terms and related concepts emerging as events unfold from the Web’s collective reaction and participation with Wikileaks. Users can observe the emergence of topics of interest, and with a mouse-over and click, see the Web events that relate with the selection. This makes awareness and discovery much faster than managing alerts, search queries, or browsing through countless news/blogs/social web sites.

You can either look at the general buzz from these sites or choose attractors to focus on specific topics of interest. The default shows you what has happened in the target content sources in the last hour. You can expand it to the last two hours, 24 hours and even last 200 hours. You can focus on the more formal sources or the informal ones (bloggers) or look across both. Again, details instructions can be found in our post on instructions.

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Please contact us at feedback@DarwinEco.com. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin edition with all administration rights. You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection. There are both individual and enterprise options.

The Nielsen Company provides research that indicates Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging. However the channels of communications are shifting. The share of time for social networks use climbed to 22.7% in June 2010, up from 15.8% in June 2009. This is gain of 43%. At the same time the share of time for email dropped from 11.5% in June 2009 to 8.3% in June 2010. This is drop of 28%. Luis Suarez will be pleased (see: posts on “a world without email”).

With mobile devices email still holds strong for now while social networking use is growing. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a 28 percent rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continued with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.

Does this switch to social media tools transfer to action within the enterprise? I have heard from some sources that email is starting to be replaced by social collaboration tools (see my last two posts: What Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 Can Bring to HR Processes and Looking at the Social Enterprise with eXO CEO Benjamin Mestrallet) ). While many of the social collaboration tools offer email integration to attract those locked into email, the stated goal of many is to take activities out from the email inbox. I would be pleased to see research on this but I am hopeful. I know from personal experience that it is hard to kick the email habit but I also have seen the benefits.

January 25, 2011

﻿Much has happened to bring social applications into the enterprise in the past few years. I recently spoke with eXo CEO Benjamin Mestrallet who shared his observations on this trend. First, a bit about eXo. Their new release, eXo Platform 3.0, provides a foundation for portal-based enterprise apps. It describes itself as a “user experience platform” for creating modern, user-centric Java applications that can be deployed on premise or in the cloud.

Benjamin said it has three main components. You can manage web sites. It is an application development platform and it can manage social interactions within the enterprise. We focused on this last capability. It provides what can be called a social portal. You can set up activity streams within it to integrate enterprise communication.

To enhance the interface for these streams, eXo recently launched an eXo plugin for Seesmic. The Seesmic desktop client works like TweetDeck to set up columns to bring order to your activity streams. I think this is a great move as it took the use of Tweetdeck for Twitter to work for me and now I am a fan and heavy user. While eXo has microblogging features, these columns can aggregate more than the microblogging content. In addition to the microblogging capability, you can follow people as you do in Twitter and get feeds from objects such as sales leads or projects.

Benjamin said that they are seeing a new type of client. In the past most of their clients were large enterprises. Now much smaller companies are looking into the social aspects of company portals. There are also many government organizations looking into social tools within the enterprise. These new clients come with an awareness of social tools from the Web. They are comfortable with these types of tools. Benjamin said he is seeing a migration from work communication through email to activity streams. These streams are becoming the new online work place. This was also the finding in my post yesterday (see What Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 Can Bring to HR Processes)

I find this migration interesting and encouraging. Many of the new social collaboration tools are enabling email integration as they feel that that is where workers are more comfortable. If the trend that Benjamin is seeing holds, this integration may become less necessary. I can certainly see the benefits of operating within a social tool versus email. It also makes sense that people who are familiar with Web tools like Facebook will choose to work within more social tools such as activity streams. I also know that this migration can be difficult for some who are very used to email.

Benjamin said that making an intranet more social increases adoption and engagement. Workers feel like they have greater ownership of the intranet and its content as they are providing more of it. Managers are able to more easily monitor what is happening within the enterprise and take action. Benjamin said that software vendors should be aware that social capabilities need to be at the core of content and collaboration platforms and not simply features. I can agree with this.

Activity streams can also be easily pushed through mobile devices, increasing their adoption and expanding their use cases. Putting work content into activity streams - rather than offering it through email - allows you to better track it, share it, and find it again. Benjamin closed by saying the advent of social capabilities is just the beginning and many more use cases and impacts remain to be uncovered. I would certainly agree here, as well.

January 24, 2011

Last week I had the pleasure of doing a webinar with the enterprise 2.0 software firm, Bitrix. We covered “The Business Value of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0” with an emphasis on HR process because of the audience. I want to share with you a bit of my thoughts from that session. I first set some context with the classic 2006 McKinsey report on IT spending most of their budgets on transactions but the real business value is in the interactions between people and this area has been underinvested. And they noted that, “jobs involving the most complex type of interactions—those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and solve problems—make up the fastest-growing segment.”

Social media had begun to emerge by then as a solution to support interactions. Early enterprise efforts usually involved bringing in consumer Web tools or creating custom versions of them as Al Essa did at the MIT Sloan School in 2004 when he was CIO. These were mostly one off efforts or ones that used less than optimal tools for the enterprise.

Now the enterprise social media market matured significantly. To fill the real business need addressed by the 2006 report, a new class of tools has emerged such as Bitrix that are designed to do what the MIT CIO did but with many more business capabilities available out of the box, and much more alignment with business requirements such as security.

These new tools bring transparency, support for interactions, accessibility to the valuable content that emerges through these interactions. They are potentially great productivity and performance enhancers. These tools combine such capabilities as content management, collaboration, and project management with the social features made popular by Web 2.0. A key is the alignment of these new tools with business process and tasks. We are also seeing more integration of capabilities within a single tool set.

Now many of us have the seen the more recent 2010 McKinsey report that documents a big pay off from using social media within the enterprise. I find these tools work best when aligned with business process and are not simply introduced as capabilities such as phones or email. This is what Bitrix supports with its ability to create workflows with interaction capabilities, visualizations of org charts, organized business discussions, calendaring, and the management of projects with trackable task assignments. Others have taken similar approaches. I am sure the MIT people would have appreciated having these capabilities in their 2004 efforts. We have come a long way.

HR represents a rich area to apply social media to business processes. For inspiration, I first turned to the work of my long time Web friend, Gautam Ghosh, who recently wrote a guest column on Social media and HR. In this sound piece he outlined ways that social media can address the HR areas of recruitment, learning and development, compensation and benefits, HR processes, and employee engagement. I will not repeat Gautam’s examples here but offer some new ones from a Bitrix client, a large mental health agency in the US.

Recruitment: They are able to more effectively post vacancies with increased participation from internal candidates and volunteers. These groups now are now filling 50% of vacancies. I would think that this also makes them a more attractive employer for younger workers who are used to social media and appreciate it.

Learning and development: A third of training courses for employees and volunteers are done online through social media. There is a significant improvement in the percentage of finished courses versus started only. I have also seen in other situations that social media based training can be much more effective because of increased transparency and involvement.

Compensation and benefits: Now updated forms are shared more effectively. There is a single storage accessible from all locations. Mileage reimbursement is another area that has been improved with uniform, automatic submitting without having to use email.

HR Process: They are now more effectively enabling and disabling users on the computer network. Assignments are placed directly to the IT department, not sent by email. There is less ‘handling’ of the information in the chain. In another example salary changes with approvals through social media have replaced cluttered and potentially neglected email.

Employee Engagement: There is increased interaction among locations, including and especially photos and videos. There is greater relationship building among patients and families. In addition the structure and look-and-feel for the volunteers who work there has an increased level of professionalism with clearer instructions and quicker orientation. There is also greater Internal communications through forums with increased collective problem solving and camaraderie.

I think these are some concrete examples and many others will emerge as companies further implement social media and understand the potential it brings to the enterprise.

January 23, 2011

This is the fourth in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. I present images from the Waterkant. It is adjacent to Bo-Kaap but the original inhabitants, mostly descendents of freed slaves, where not as fortunate as those in Bo-Kaap and were removed in the 1950s. It has now become a very trendy area in the past 15 years given the central location and beautiful older homes. There are many small hotels and homes for travelers to rent.

January 22, 2011

This is the third in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. I present images from the Bo-Kapp district which centrally located between the central business district and the lower slopes of Signal Hill It is a predominantly Muslim district with many mosques, originally settled by freed slaves who had been brought to Cape Town from the Dutch East Indies. The district population was spared being removed during Apartheid. I took a cooking class in one of the homes and learned a bit of what is called Cape Malay cooking. We made roti bread, samoses, chicken curry, chili bites and other good things. I highly recommend the experience see the Andulela site for details, I also did their jazz tour which was equally great.

First - Dave noted that most people can produce a decent meal through recipes and the right ingredients. A master chef can produce a great meal with whatever is your kitchen. We need theory and not just recipes to blindly follow.

We developed the Darwin interface to be very simple to use. It only takes a few minutes to understand how to make use of the data visualizations. However, it works best under the hands of a master who really knows the content, can select the right feeds and make hypotheses to test through following feeds, Rob Paterson’s work with KETC is a great example (see KETC TV Social Media Experience Part Four: How Does Darwin Help Clarify Complex Issues?)

Second – Dave noted that the human brain scans a small percentage of the available data and makes quick decisions. The only people who look at all the data are autistic and they are overwhelmed but management theory adopts this autistic approach. To react to the charging lion you cannot examine all the data before you react.

We designed both the Scan Cloud™ and the Buzz Tape™ for quick scanning (see below) only you to check out a vast amount of data quickly and rill down where you find interesting things. Anomalies show up.

Third - Dave said that despite what Chomsky said, there are no deep structures in language and so taxonomies are useful but limited. We would certainly agree at Darwin since we let the content self-organize dynamically rather than impose an external structure. We are the opposite of semantic technology. If you let the content self organize there is no external framework like Google Page Rank to game or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it would serve no value. We allow the visualization of connections between content related to a particular theme to reveal new relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated and unanticipated.

Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like page rank as done by Google, we use Correlation Rank™ to find non-repeatable patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content itself.

Fourth - Dave noted that technology needs to be seen as cognitive augmentation. Larry Prusack said intuition is just compressed experience. The human brain blends fragments in the face of challenge. He noted how General Patton did this in World War Two. We use provide the bits of content so the human mind can decide on how to put them together. Darwin Correlation Rank™ does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs

Fifth - Dave stated that we need to move from aggregation for people to allowing people to synthesize fragments. We need to allow for contextual blending of fragments. We need to put decision makers in direct contact with the raw data. This is our goal at Darwin.

January 20, 2011

In the world of the social Web, product recommendations by individuals seems to be gaining more credibility that those by the product producers. But do employees tend to recommend the products that their company produces? This is a question that Matt Brown asks in the Forrester report, Do Your Employees Advocate For Your Company? It would seem that this should be in their best interest.

However, Matt found that 49% of information workers are detractors, and only 27% were promoters, however in North America, workers are three times as likely to advocate as European workers. We could speculate about the reasons for this geographic variation. Canada had the best scores in our survey, France the worst. I wonder what the French Canadians do?

There was another interesting finding that relates more to the focus of this blog. Forrester found that, “advocacy correlates with work technology attitudes and behaviors in North America. This means employees who are optimistic about technology and well-equipped with information and communications technology (ICT) are more likely to be net advocates than those who are not.”

So what can companies do to improve their employees’ advocacy? Josh Bernoff addresses this in his post, How many of your employees love your products? (And why it matters). He suggests that you could empower people. In fact workers who use social media are among the most positive. 48% would strongly recommend a company's products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% -- among the highest of the groups they surveyed.

So get employees engaged in social media both on the Web and within the enterprise. This encouragement to be engaged in product discussions should have a positive impact on what employees will say. It shows that the company trusts them. Part of this is providing the technology that enables these discussions and the policy that permits the use of this technology in an open way. Restrictions will only promote resentment. I was pleased to receive a review copy of this report and there is much more within it to help formulate policies to promote employee advocacy.

January 19, 2011

According to a recent survey over 60 percent of respondents in the mid-size business space say they are ready to look to the cloud. Many are already using virtualization but only 4 percent are using the cloud now to back up data. In addition, 63% say they are using 10% or less of their applications on a SaaS platform. So this projects a major shift in the mid-size business IT architecture.

Are these companies prepared? It seems that there is work to be done as 79% do not have a plan for their move into the cloud. Many see the advantages as 63% feel that the cloud offers cost savings and 29% feel that the cloud offers more flexibility. At the same time, only 8% believe there is no advantage to the cloud.

Many of the vendors reviewed on this blog operate on SaaS platforms so there is challenge here for them to further penetrate the mid-size market. The good news is that the desire for the cloud is there, the caution is the lack of strategic planning in place.

Social media is generally operates on a cloud platform. In the large company space I have seen at least one study that indicate over 80% of companies plan to use social media in 2011 but another study found less than half have a strategy for social media use. This parallel between social media and the cloud is not surprising. In both cases vendors need to avoid prompting tools and services because they are the latest thing and help clients address planning and strategy requirements to make sure their applications are kept for the long run.

January 18, 2011

As reported in the New York Times, a new Pew Research study finds that some of the greatest gains in social media use are occurring in older generations. For example, the percentage of Web users between 55 and 64 using social tools increased from 9% in December 2008 to 43% in May 2010. Now I was there all along but nice to see more of my age peers getting involved. At the same time period, those 74 and older who are online quadrupled their social networking presence from 4 to16 percent.

The same trend occurs with blogging. Only half as many online teens are blogging now as in 2006. Those ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline. . At the same time, however, blogging has increased among most older generations. This has driven the rate of blogging for all online adults up slightly from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Many former bloggers are now are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates on Facebook and Twitter, among other new channels.

What does this mean for the enterprise? Now we go from research by others to my opinions. The use of social media has often been seen as an act of the young workers. I usually objected to this but now there is research to back up these protests. We can now count on more older workers to have familiarity with social media as we implement it within the enterprise. I would like to see similar research within the enterprise.

I am especially pleased to see the continued rise in blogging by older generations. Perhaps they have more to say that what can be compressed into 140 character sounds bites. Blog on.

January 17, 2011

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information. Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you. Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

January 16, 2011

Cape Town South Africa has one of the most beautiful settings of any city in the world. This is the second in along series covering the city and surrounding area. Below is Old Townhouse, restored building from the 1755 with a garden in the back. It had an exhibit of art against Apartheid.

Here are scenes from the Company Gardens first started as a vegetable patch for the Dutch settlement. There are also some adjacent buildings.

Here is the main art museum, adjacent to the Company Gardens.

The next two posts will look at the Waterkant, one of the older parts of the city.

January 15, 2011

Cape Town South Africa has one of the most beautiful settings of any city in the world. To the left you can see the city outline and Table Mountain above it from Robben Island. I had the pleasure of spending time there in November and December 2010. This is the first in a series of posts covering Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape region. Below are scenes form the central business district. There is a long pedestrian space with trees and food stands. This is the oldest part in terms of European settlement as the Dutch first settled here in the 1650s. This first picture shows the City Bowl from the shore. You can click on any image to enlarge it.

This is Long Street which is one of the major night life areas.

The next post will cover several museums and gardens in the City Bowl.

January 14, 2011

I continue to be interested in the integration of old and new media. Here is another really innovative integration of computers and TV. There is a promotion going on for NBC’s new series, The Cape. NBC has partnered with DC Comics to make the full pilot episode available through DC’s free comic book iPad application. This is a free way for fans to check out the pilot before it airs and is a very interesting way of making the show available for fans to see outside their traditional television set.

This is the first time DC Comics has offered long form video through their iPad application (which is also available for the iPhone). Web and TV conversion continues to be innovative and interesting. Here is a link to download the DC Comics iPad application.

However, as the New York Times recently noted that there is no standard way for the Web TV convergence and this may be a problem. They write, “But recent missteps by technology companies like Google with its Google TV service, as well as the often confusing mosaic of streaming and download providers, has left the market looking a little muddled.” I hope that standards will be implemented to further open up this great opportunity for creative applications.

January 13, 2011

Here is a useful list of knowledge management blogs to start the year. It includes three categories: general knowledge management, Web 2.0 and content management, and collaboration. The list from Biz-gasm offers a brief description of each listing so they took some time to get to know the sources. All the ones I know on the list are excellent and I learned a few new ones to check out. Of course, there are other great ones relevant to KM that are missing such as Euan Semple, Gautam Ghosh, Megan Murray, Samuel Driessen, Bertrand Duperrin, and Mary Abraham but this is a nice start.

Many of the blogs on the list are included as content sources for the Darwin Edition on Enterprise Social Media since that target content also covers knowledge management. I learned a few new ones that I added to the content sources. The Darwin Editions provide a way to efficiently monitor the conversations within a target set of content.

For the first time, Google has been named the overall Global MAKE Winner. Knowledge-driven organizations significantly out-perform their competitors. For the ten-year period 2000-2009, the Total Return to Shareholders for the publicly-traded 2010 Global MAKE Winners was 11% - nearly 3 times that of the Fortune 500 company median.

The Winners of the 2010 Global MAKE study, conducted by Teleos in association with The KNOW Network, are (in alphabetical order):

- Accenture

- Apple

- Ernst & Young

- Fluor

- General Electric

- Google

- HP

- IBM

- Infosys Technologies

- McKinsey & Company

- Microsoft

- MindTree

- PwC

- Royal Dutch Shell

- Samsung

- Schlumberger

- Siemens

- Tata Group

- Telefonica

- Wipro Technologies

A panel of Global Fortune 500 senior executives and knowledge management/intellectual capital experts selected the 2010 Global MAKE Winners. The panel rated organizations against the MAKE framework of eight key knowledge performance dimensions which are the visible drivers of competitive advantage. The 2010 Global MAKE Winners have been recognized as leaders in:

I had the pleasure of attending some of McLuhan’s seminars while I was doing my graduate school work at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. These were exciting experiences with rapid fire pronouncements from McLuhan. He was full of ideas and quickly moved from one to another. Marshall did not like to take questions because, as he said, he was three or four ideas further down the road when a question was asked. Carr notes a similar trait when he writes, “He (McLuhan) loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis.” He might not have liked Twitter given the 140 character limit but I am sure he would something to say about it.

David Carr writes that Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances, just like McLuhan. He notes that Coupland writes that it was “McLuhan’s ability to anticipate the homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media when the phenomenon was in its infancy that made him remarkable.” McLuhan felt that the fact that the medium is the message was a bad thing. He did not like the triumph of context over content. He was not a fan of Mad Men.

What was especially impressive was that McLuhan offered these conclusions before there was any genuine understanding of how human beings process mediated information. He was ahead of most of the cognitive psychologists of his day. As Carr quotes Coupland: “One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

I was at the University of Toronto indirectly because of McLuhan. I had developed an interest in the effects of media on cognition through looking at how young children did art. David Olson, a psychologist at U of T, was looking at this issue. He had initially been motivated to look at the concept by McLuhan’s work. So I choose to go to Toronto to study with David Olson. I have seen a lot of research that indicates that the communication channels we use help shape our messages and how we receive them. I did some myself.

This was a new concept in cognitive psychology, as well as in the general dialogue. Coupland quotes McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” and Carr notes that was “describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed.”

This impact of the Web on our thoughts, relationships, and business continues to interest me. It is ironic that it grew from an interest in the 1970s in the cognitive thought processes that children use as they create art and was indirectly influenced by someone studying Renaissance art and literature mostly prior to the 20th century. I looked at visual versus verbal thought but the same general concepts hold. Media does help shape cognition. I am pleased to see this new work. It both brings back memories and covers the still relevant work of a creative and complex thinker.

January 10, 2011

This is good news. According to a new forecast from Forrester, global tech spending will rise 7.1 percent in 2011 to $1.7 trillion, according to new forecast data from Forrester. Analyst Andrew Bartels writes that while the 2011 global tech market will be similar to the 7.2 percent market growth experienced in 2010, there will be significant differences between the two years in terms of both products and geographies.

Andrew projects that after the computer restocking and replacement boom that propelled the tech market in 2010, hardware growth will slow to 7.4 percent, with software starting to accelerate. Enterprise demand for wireless, unified communications, and videoconferencing is also increasing. The IT services and outsourcing market will be mixed, with growth in some areas (e.g., project services in the US and outsourcing in Latin America) but weakness elsewhere.

It is interesting to note that what is often considering the developing areas (Latin America and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EEMEA) regions) will have the highest growth rates in 2011, both at 9.8 percent. Asia Pacific, at 8.5 percent, and the US, at 7.5 percent, will grow slightly faster than the total global market. This is consistent with general growth in GDP in some of these areas. For example, the report mentions that according to the latest poll of economists by The Economist, both Argentina’s and Brazil’s real GDP will grow by 5.1%, with Chile’s growing 5.9%

After a strong 2010, the Canadian IT market will only grow at 4.9 percent. Western and Central Europe and will have the lowest growth rate, at four percent, with the combination of weak economic growth and a depreciating euro combining to hold dollar-denominated growth down. The weakest markets in this area will be Italy, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. Best performing will be the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Poland.

The US tech industry will grow about twice as fast as nominal GDP in 2011, at 7.4%, as investments in cloud and Smart Computing solutions provide the IT tools for companies to grow profits despite weak revenue increases. Software sales will be stronger than hardware. The government market for IT will lag, though, as federal, state, and local governments struggle with high deficits. I can see this as I read about struggling state and local budgets and federal efforts to cut spending.

January 09, 2011

I have scheduled this post for some time. After yesterday's shootings I thought a bit about it. I decided to keep it up in respect for the work of the wounded Arizona congresswoman. While I am disturbed by the violent speech that has entered our political debates, I remain optimistic about our country and feel that the majority of the American people want a rational and non-violent debate over issues. I hope that this tragedy will reinforce this desire and tone down the violent speech and symbols. Here are my original words and they still hold.

I was in our Capital recently and took these pictures. I remain excited to be there and like the architecture and monuments. Here are a few.

January 08, 2011

This concludes my series on Emilia-Romagna. Having a cup of espresso is one of the great pleasures of visiting Italy. Here are some of the many cups available with a tea pot and cookie thrown in at the the end and a cappaccino in the middle. Several of these followed the three lunches that I posed on Dec 18.

Weak Signal Sensing is the ability to detect anomalies and other valuable bits within complex arrays of information. It is a skill developed over time and is one of the traits that separates deep experts from novices. The use of social media within the enterprise and on the Web has created a rich source of content to mine for insights. It is a data rich environment for Weak Signal Sensing. Recognizing this potential a large number of tools have emerged to try to make sense of this data through such means as sentiment analysis, popularity ranking, and semantic technology. They have taken on the difficult task of trying to get a computer to understand and pick out the valuable bits within the rich corpus of content generated as a byproduct of the transparency to interactions within enterprise 2.0 and on the Web.

At Darwin Ecosystem we take an alternative approach to enabling Weak Signal Sensing with the Awareness Engine™. Rather than have the computer attempt to make sense of content and try the even more difficult task of where to look next, an Awareness Engine allows the content to self-organize into simple visualizations that enable people to better perform these tasks of exploration and discovery. It avoids predetermined categories that can inhibit discovery of the unexpected. Using such visualizations as a Buzz Tape™ which highlights rising topics of interest and a Scan Cloud™ which allows a quick exploration of the themes within selected content, an awareness engine empowers experts to more efficiently make use of their capabilities. It can also spread Weak Signal Sensing capabilities further within an organization.

Organizations making use of enterprise 2.0 technologies are capturing information that emerges from collaborative discussion, deliberations and ideas that are now stored in systems. The advent of enterprise 2.0 portals have allowed for the context of teams and projects to be connected for easy content creation and retrieval. As such, we are previewed to the processes that lead to actions. Although incredibly useful, organizations often limit the transparency by imposing hierarchical and role-base access to this body of information. This limitation prevents knowledge workers from increasing their Weak Signal Sensing capability. Weak Signal Sensing is encouraged and accepted at the highest levels of management as it is acquired from experience and knowledge captured across many different and unexpected sources. This is what allows a senior executive to deliver credible and strategic value to the organization, whereas junior managers would have to prove their reasoning before being enacted.

The information that can empower ubiquitous Weak Signal Sensing is found in all sources, but it is in one's memory and experiences above all. This is why you can't automate Weak Signal Sensing; it is personal and the product of one's cognitive ability to sort meaning from noise. The value of increasing Weak Signal Sensing is paramount in today's changing world and economic models. An organization capable of improving this faculty will have more actionable ideas and a competitive advantage over stove-pipe and highly process driven companies.

The key to elevating Weak Signal Sensing for all is to provide tools that go beyond search and related records. Tools that improve awareness and serendipitous discoveries. Tools that reveal different answers and intrigues according to different users. Basically tools that awaken one's own memories and experiences to identify actions and information that needs to be shared.

The value of increasing weak signal sensing is paramount in today's changing world and economic models. An organization capable of improving this faculty will have more actionable ideas and a competitive advantage.

The main findings indicated that 180 (22%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is up from 81 companies (16%) in 2008. To no surprise IT companies have the most blogs. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox. The specialty retail industry increased its blogging by from 4 companies on the 2008 list to 7 from the 2009 list. Included are companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us and BJ’s Wholesale. This is perhaps because of the increasing awareness of social media marketing.

The big players seem to like blogs more. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500. In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. The top 200 companies in 2009 had 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) had 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs. They seem to be open to conversations as 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. This is consistent with the 2008 findings.

Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account. This is a three-fold increase from 2008. Twitter usage is now running ahead of blogs as 173 (35%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days. Only 4 protected their tweets and these were not included in the total.

The insurance industry has the most Twitter accounts (13) with It and telecom following with 10 each. Like blogs size matters as 47% of the 173 twitter accounts belong to Fortune 500 companies in the top 200 while 35% come from those listed in the bottom 200 (201-500) on the 2009 list.

While there is growth in blogging in the Fortune 500 they are still blogging at a lower rate than the smaller Inc. 500 firms where 45% now have a blog. You can find a complete listing of those with blogs and twitter accounts in the research paper.

So it seems that blogs and Twitter are taking hold. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Twitter usage is higher. However, if you only tweet and do not blog you are not able to get comprehensive messages out and are generally pointing to the messages of others. Perhaps those Twitter only firms are just interested in getting sound bytes out.

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides an easy way to keep track of all these tweets and blog posts. You can set up Darwin Editions™ on your topic of interests, including what the Fortune 500 or the Inc. 500 are saying.

January 05, 2011

Since its inception in 1993, at the start of the first wave of internet-based businesses, BroadVision has gone through a series of transitions. It began by helping companies do business on the Web and in the late 90s they were one of the firms to bring personalization to ecommerce. The firm survived the dotcom bust of the early 2000s but came out smaller. I recently spoke with their CMO, Giovanni Rodriguez, to get an update on their current efforts.

CEO, Pehong Chenwisely decided to bet on the viability of the native cloud. BroadVision then built a cloud based collaboration platform to provide social networking for the enterprise. Their offering, sometimes referred to as “Ning for the enterprise”, is built with the goal of not requiring heavy involvement from enterprise IT to set up. A future goal is to create a “network of networks”, where companies and individuals can discover new business partners, providers, and clients through transparency across networks.

Clearvale is the name for their collaboration platform and it was launched in May 2010. It contains many of the features found within the enterprise 2.0 concept such as communities, profile pages, blogs, wikis, networks, forums, RSS, and twitter integration, whichcan be customized through drag and drop editing. Here is a sample screen:

In November, they introduced Clearvale PaasPort, which enables companies to host their own installation of the Clearvale enterprise social networking solution. PaasPort hosts can sell Clearvale solutions, as well as premium services, to their own customers. Clearvale PaasPort is a platform-as-a-service solution provided to customers, who can deliver BroadVision Clearvale as part of a large package of services, or as a more specialized solution. One of the initial clients for this service is Softbank Telecom in Japan, which will provide integrated email, IM and voice through this capability. This unified communication will occur through a social network allowing you to store and save voice messages. I see great potential here.

Another major aspect of the new BroadVision Clearvale platform that I especially like is MyStreams, a personalized data stream management and filtering system. MyStreams integrates a wide variety of data streams into one easy-to-use interface. While this includes data from within the Clearvale network -- such as updates to wikis, blogs and forums -- it is also built to include external data streams, such as email, voicemail, social media, IM, as well as streams from consumer social networks. All of these data streams are integrated into MyStreams and can be accessed and managed without ever having to exit Clearvale. MyStreams also allows users to easily share specific data with other users. It generates an RSS feed and allows for filtering along with aggregation. Below is a sample screen:

Overcoming content silos is one of the necessary efforts with enterprise 2.0. We run the risk of creating new silos with unconnected wikis, blogs, forums, etc. A number of firms are looking at micro-blogging status updates that run across applications as one way to avoid this problem. MyStreams goes beyond basic micro-blogging and serves this cross-application aggregation function along with other capabilities.

I like these steps as they extend current capabilities in cross channel communication integration and exploit some of the potential that comes with making these channels; including voice, into data objects.

January 04, 2011

I have been discussing the Darwin Awareness Engine™ a bit on this blog and wanted to start the new year off with a brief updated overview. There is an explosion of content on the Web and within the enterprise that is partially fueled by the increase in social media use. Beneath this information overload is a wealth of useful content waiting to be discovered. Increasing awareness and discovery of relevant content in the proper context is the goal Darwin Ecosystem. Its Awareness Engine™ gives users the ability to perceive and be conscious of events and patterns of activities captured in the enterprise and Web 2.0. While search attempts to answer known questions, awareness provides a greater context including the unanticipated.

Operating in real time, the Awareness Engine allows for the extremely efficient scanning of content to find both breaking news and deep underlying casual patterns in the topics of your interest. Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, our approach to awareness based on Chaos Theory provides a visualization of results that better enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next. Then there are tools that allow for efficient drilling down into relevant details. It builds on a person’s expertise rather than trying to replace it.

There are the two visualizations: the Buzz Tape™ and the Scan Cloud™. The Buzz Tape runs across the top of the screen as seen below and displays themes of rising (green) or falling (red) interest within the target content. The Scan Cloud shows the top themes within the target content. Running the mouse over one theme highlights the others that are related to it. In the right column the actual content connected with themes is displayed. Clicking on this content will take you directly to the source.

As a user you can click on any of the themes within the Buzz Tape or the Scan Cloud and they become the focus of a new Scan Cloud that the system quickly generates. Darwin works in real time. As user you can quickly adjust the time period for the harvested content to be the last hour, last two hours, or last 24 hours using the selection options near the top of the screen. You can even expand it to 200 hours through the attractor creation process described below.

The photos come through two sources. Some RSS feeds provide pictures. We also link to relevant Flickr images. You can even choose to collect videos through YouTube by choosing videos when you select sources as described below. The YouTube videos are listed under the informal sources in the right column.

You can either simply look at the general buzz within the targeted content or create attractors, that serve as queries, to further refine you content discovery. For example, you can look at how your brand or some other topic of interest is being discussed. To create a new attractor, you fill in the attractor field in the top right. For example, I put in Boston, my hometown, in the attractor field and received these results shown below.

Then you can further edit your attractor by clicking in the edit space next to where it appears in the upper left. An edit field appears, such as the one shown below. You can adjust the time period for content collection up to 200 hours by using the slider. You can select which feeds to use by choosing from the drop down or simply allow for everything by not making a selection. It is best to start this way. You can also select if you want to only see more formal (traditional news sources) or less formal sources (bloggers). Not selecting either provides all content sources.

Once you have refined your attractor you can save it in the lower right corner of the edit field. Then when you click on the plus sign in the upper left all of your saved attractors will appear for you selection.

The Awareness Engine is a Web browser application (Scan Cloud™) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortex™ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs.

We provide a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost. You only have to go through a brief registration process and we promise you that no sales person will contact you as a result. Here are descriptions and links to the first three the first Darwin Editions.

January 03, 2011

Here are my AppGap posts for December. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008. Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for December. There will be more in January.